An eminent reputation is as dangerous as a bad one.
No student ever attains very eminent success by simply doing what is required of him: it is the amount and excellence of what is over and above the required, that determines the greatness of ultimate distinction.
It is not eminent talent that is required to ensure success in any pursuit, so much as purpose-not merely the power to achieve, but the will to labour energetically and perseveringly. Hence energy of will may be defined to be the very central power of character in a man-in a word, it is the Man himself.
A man improves more by reading the story of a person eminent for prudence and virtue, than by the finest rules and precepts of morality.
I would say here something that was heard from an ecclesiastic of the most eminent degree: The intention of the Holy Spirit is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how the heavens go.
It is the practice of the multitude to bark at eminent men, as little dogs do at strangers.
Few spirits are made better by the pain and languor of sickness; as few great pilgrims become eminent saints.
A president should take action to defend the United States against eminent threat. You have to. The president has to do that.
This process of election affords a moral certainty that the office of President will seldom fall to the lot of any many who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.
And when you get an eminent journal like Time magazine complaining, as it often has, that to the young writers of today life seems short on rewards and that what they write is a product of their own neuroses, in its silly way the magazine is merely stating the status quo and obvious truth. The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.
A great man is different from an eminent one in that he is ready to be the servant of the society.
